The first quarter of 2011 is almost over, so it is high time to give you, our Best-Built Application Guidelines (BBA) followers, some detailed information on our plans for the future. When you look at our SAP Guidelines for Best-Built Applications book today, and if you remember our promises from SAP TechEd 2009, you’ll find that we fully delivered on the content we committed to, and also provided additional resources that include blogs and recorded webinars.
As Richard wrote in his The Jail-Breaking of Best-Built Applications, the BBA community feedback is driving us forward to deliver an expanded BBA scope in 2011 that will include guidelines for both partners and customers!
BBA is not only represented by “the book” but also through tremendous internal and external SAP community support. This support includes the SAP Mentors, who tirelessly contributed input to BBA, the more than 100 SAP colleagues contributing their expert knowledge, and finally, the contributions of you, our readers.
To further nurture these communities, I’m pleased to announce that we have created a /community [original link is broken] on SDN.
The BBA forum, like any other SDN forum, is open to your questions and you may answer other’s questions and lock in SDN reward points in the process. We invite you to use the BBA forum to ask for and/or share examples of how the BBA guidelines add value to your application development efforts. The forum will be monitored by the BBA team to ensure speedy replies to questions (if there are not answered by the BBA community) and for noting your comments as input for future BBA revisions and extensions.
Guidelines really become interesting when they are applied in practice! The BBA team wants to stay in close contact with our readers to share guideline experiences. To foster that exchange we will take some more bolt steps in 2011. We will launch a BBA influence council at the next ASUG/Sapphire conference in May. Check for details on this session, they’ll soon be posted on the BBA page.
We reached out to the German speaking customer community DSAG in Europe already last year (see our article in the 8/2010 DSAG Newsletter in German) . We continue to collaborate with DSAG and will update you on new activities with them.
Our education webinar series will continue; we’re pleased to shared that our SAP Guidelines for Best-Built Applications Webinar Series to the SAP Partner Edge community had a record number of attendees last year, which was the first year where we offered them! As always, our past and future webinars are recorded and listed on our website. Already one webinar about the Security chapter for Best-Built Applications was done in February this year.
The biggest community of all is of course the SCN itself. Therefore we plan to renovate and extend our main website. Watch for changes and ways for you to find the information and resources you need – quicker. Communities live through sharing and a very welcome contribution from you, our reader, would be to share your experience with BBA through the forum and blogs. Plus, if you’d write a BBA related blog, there is a good chance that we’ll feature it on our website.
Before I switch to our new content plans for 2011, I’d like to pose a question - did you notice the new SAP Guidelines for Best-Built Applications? BBA is now available as SAP Guidelines for Best-Built Applications, SAP Guidelines for Best-Built Applications and Wiki all free of charge. You can always order hardcopies from Amazon, if you choose. I recently became an iPad fan. Maybe send us a note what format you prefer.
As SAP’s products constantly evolve and new ones get created, BBA needs to be updated accordingly to stay current and relevant. Therefore, new BBA content creation will always continue. It is always worthwhile for you to re-download a new version of BBA about every 2-3 months, which is our typical update cycle.
In 2011 we’ll continue to develop content in two ways:
- Existing chapters need revisions to include new developments; therefore, you’ll see a number of re-publications of updated chapters. So far, planned revisions will include the ALM, UI/UX and EIM chapters. More may be added to this list later this year.
- We will develop entirely new chapters; the Business Intelligence (BI) "BI Tools" chapter will be extended and we plan to add Mobility and SAP Gateway content as well.
I hope you like our plans for 2011. We look forward to your engagement with the BBA initiative through:
- considering our Guidelines for your daily work with SAP products
- sharing your experience and questions on the BBA forum
- your participation in our joint activities with ASUG and DSAG
- leaving comments on any of our SDN publication or blogging on SDN about BBA yourself
- just contacting us directly
